Tag Archives: voting

Voter Fraud

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Progressive-Democrats like to decry claims of voter fraud, denying the very existence of it and deprecating those who worry about its impact on elections, even as they worry—correctly—about Russian attempts to alter our elections.

However.

Non-American citizens are increasingly found on voter rolls thanks to covert registration methods, with nothing actually stopping them from casting a ballot in an election.

For instance,

Elizaveta Shuvalova, a Russian citizen who became a US citizen only last year, was registered as an eligible voter in 2012 and added to the San Francisco voter rolls, The Washington Times reported.

She was perplexed to find herself in the voter rolls, saying she wasn’t an American citizen and didn’t even register to vote.
…
The woman’s voter log shows that she signed up as a Democrat in July 2012.

It’s not just California [emphasis added].

The Public Interest Legal Foundation…found that nearly 5,600 people on the voter rolls in Virginia were deemed as non-citizens, with a third of them voting in previous elections.

These same Progressive-Democrats object to Voter ID laws, too.

Suboptimal

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A Maryland gerrymandering case, this one brought by the Republican Party, after it lost an election in the newly gerrymandered district, was before the Supreme Court this week.

One of the plaintiffs’ arguments is that the redistricting “violated Republican voters’ free-expression and political-association rights.”

Justice Sam Alito had the correct response to that bit of nonsense:

[I]f understand it, I really don’t see how any legislature will ever be able to redistrict[]

If the Republicans don’t have anything more than whining about losing an election, how can their legitimate gerrymandering complaints be taken seriously?

A Justice Misunderstands

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The Supreme Court heard arguments the other day on an Ohio voter registration law.  That law removes voters from the roll if they haven’t voted over a two-year period and don’t respond to a follow-up notice from Ohio’s Secretary of State.

It’s a partisan case from the Left’s perspective: those opposing the law argue, with some justification, that those who live in urban regions (and who happen to vote Democratic) relocate more frequently than do those who live in the ‘burbs and out in the country (and who happen to vote Republican).  This would seem to put Democrats at a disadvantage in elections since they’re more likely to have not voted over a two-year period and not responded to the follow-up notice.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor put the thing nakedly: Ohio’s law

results in disenfranchising disproportionately certain cities where large groups of minorities live, where large groups of homeless people live

and, as the WSJ added,

including people who can’t make it to the polls because of the long hours they work.

The one is at best a misunderstanding, albeit entirely consistent with the Left’s view that responsibility lies with Government and not with the individual.  The other is just nonsense.

Urbanites may well have a higher turnover rate than suburbanites and [farmers], but nothing stops those who leave from registering to vote in their new jurisdiction, and nothing stops those arriving as “replacements” for the departed from registering in the current jurisdiction.  Turnover has nothing to do with it, skin color (I won’t address ethnicity; we’re all Americans in the voting booth) has nothing to do with it, homelessness has nothing to do with it (although this group has a beef in terms of demonstrating their residency so they can register).

The other is wholly irrelevant: Ohio has an extensive early voting time frame; there are lots of opportunities for those with long hours to go vote.

Congressional Districts and Gerrymandering

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North Carolina’s Congressional districts are illegally drawn, says a special three-judge court.

A special three-judge court invalidated the North Carolina map after finding Republicans adopted it for the driving purpose of magnifying the party’s political power beyond its share of the electorate.

I’ll leave aside the disparate impact sewage that local districts must reflect the larger State’s electorate “demographics.”  The larger problem is with the underlying premise of gerrymandering: that some groups of Americans need their political power enhanced relative to other groups of Americans because some groups are, in some sense, fewer in numbers than other groups.

That’s not relevant when it comes to citizenship and the citizens’ right and obligation to vote.  All Americans are the same in the voting booth.  The differentiation occurs legitimately only in the campaigns for office and on the ballot and nowhere else.  Indeed,

[T]he court’s opinion found that the Republican-drawn map violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and other provisions that deal with the election of members of Congress.

Any form of gerrymandering commits that violation, since any form of gerrymandering by design enhances one group at the expense of another.

It’s long past time for courts to recognize this—and for politicians to preempt the question by acting on their recognition of this simple fact.  Don’t gerrymander.  Draw Congressional districts solely as squares containing substantially equal populations of citizens, with the first four squares’ shared corner at the State’s geographic center and working out from there to the State’s boundaries with abutting States.  The squares’ straight sides (and the squareness of the district) should be deviated from only at those boundaries.

It’s time to treat Americans in the voting booth—in the political arena—as that which we are: Americans.  The demographic membership of an American is deeply secondary to that.

Gerrymandering and Voting Districts

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Further on the Supreme Court’s considering a Wisconsin gerrymandering case, and that dredges up some thoughts in my pea brain.

Taking the Federal government as my canonical example, I suggest the following to saucer and blow the whole gerrymandering question.  Each State should be divided into squares having substantially equal numbers of citizens resident.  Then, starting with four squares sharing a common corner that is at the geographic center of the State, add squares around the four, building outward in that fashion to the State’s borders, deviating from the square and the square’s straight-line sides only at those borders.

Notice that these squares utterly ignore all demographic considerations beyond the number of citizens resident in the State, the number of Representatives allocated to the State, and the number of citizens resident in each district.  That is, to repeat from my earlier post, what’s specified in the 14th Amendment, Section 2:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers….

And

…when the right to vote at any election…is denied to any of the male inhabitants…the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens….

That apportionment is according the number of individuals, not to any community, whether urban or rural or neighborhood, nor to ethnicity, political party affiliation, or any other criterion of demography.  In fine, a vote is an individual affair, not a community one, not a collective one, not a party one.  Indeed, further demographic apportion than “citizen” is illegitimate: all Americans are the same in the eyes of the law, and voting is a matter of the supreme Law of the Land.  All voters look alike in the polling station.

Note one more thing: such a district structure—any district structure, whether simple or gerrymandered—is essentially a political decision and so beyond the purview of any court to mandate.  It would be interesting, though, to see lower courts—perhaps a couple of appellate courts—explicitly require squares, anyway.  Such a ruling almost certainly would spark a nationwide political discussion on the matter and on the matter of voter representation generally, culminating in an explicit political decision on the proper way to draw voting districts.

With that decision, the Supreme Court then could declare the matter mooted and forestall a potful of fundamentally (and too often cynically) divisive lawsuits like the present Whitford v Gill, and like Davis v Bandemer, Vieth v Jubelirer, and others before them.

Of course, I believe in the Easter Bunny, too….